A run ‘n gun filmmaker’s POV on the business and creative world of new media and web tv

Week 2 in Review – The Hayley Project

October 19, 2008

The Hayley Project has been out for about two weeks now and there’s been more lessons learned. It’s a constant education here for the Hayley team!

We have continued to focus on YouTube as our main hub of activity. YouTube’s network effects makes it a no-brainer to focus promotion on this channel. The idea to create interaction on a third party site was ambitious. New registration is probably too much of a barrier for most viewers, especially when there’s no established brand in play

In YouTube world, subscriptions are an important performance metric. We are part of the YouTube partner program, and one thing they measure is how many subscribers you gain per week (measures the growth rate of success). In our first week, we were ranked 61st within the partner program although today, that improved to 59th

One common practice by YouTubers are to do “sub4sub”. You subscribe to them, and they subscribe to you. It seems a little sketchy but people are smart out there, and they know how to get their numbers up. This is a common practice in MySpace and facebook as well. That’s how some people get so “popular”

We’re testing some related-video algorithm optimization. We’ve said before that we think an audience who likes Veronica Mars may like The Hayley Project. So we’re testing out a few things to see if we can get our videos to show up as related videos to Veronica Mars. Results to be determined…

As a marketer, I subscribe to the philosophy of setting up tests and trying to measure the impact of each campaigns. Well….. that was before this project. Given the many different things available to try, it’s become more of a shotgun approach. Some variables that have changed over this week include changing Hayley’s thumbnail picture to a fuller headshot, getting more exposure because of the YouTube partner program, posting comments to a few veronica mars video sites, networking with other partners in the program, exploring targeted advertising on facebook, etc… etc…. In theory, marketing should always be measurable. In this case, we’ve decided to try multiple things at once as we’re trying to reach that critical mass as soon as possible

A potential result of the marketing efforts mentioned above is that our sixth video “Hear No Evil” has more total views than Ep 3, 4, and 5. This may imply that marketing will always impact the most current video the most

We’ve decided to keep our release schedule at 2 videos per week for the time being. A large reason for this is we don’t want to burn through our episodes too quickly, especially as we’re still trying to build up our base

We’re testing facebook advertising. One ad will direct people to the fan site on facebook, and the other ad will direct them to the YouTube channel. Results to come later

Good question. We had filmed multiple takes on the vlog portion, so Hayley is able to customize her interaction to some degree. We also have her character respond frequently on the youtube message boards, so that she can accept help and advice from the viewers.

We shot 37 episodes. So we expect the series to run for a few months. It’s possible that we may change the speed in which we release but for now, we’re releasing twice a week.